More photos and videos from across the month of November 2018.
Making his usual pizza at our local Italian bistro:
Being silly during a break at soccer practice:
Showing off his latest creation at Lego Robotics:
Bouncing a basketball during another break at soccer practice.
Nyan had been to Pulau Ubin — a sparsely populated island just offshore from Singapore, home to numerous nature preserves and hiking and biking trails — once before, back in 2015, but that’s more than three years ago. So one Sunday morning, we loaded up Grandma and Grandpa and headed over for some outdoor fun.
To get there, you have to take a 15-minute ride on a small, rickety wooden “bumboat.” It’s quite pleasant.
Once you’re there, you can wander around the tiny port town — which is home mostly to local seafood restaurants and bike rental shops — or you can go hiking or rent a bike. Outisde of the town are monkeys, waterfront trails and even an old Tudor-style house that’s now serving as a slightly run-down museum. We skipped the bikes and took a taxi van to an area called Chek Jawa Wetlands.
Among the attractions here is a somewhat rickety lookout tower, maybe 200 feet tall, offering very nice views over the jungle canopy and the water.
The highlight of Chek Jawa is the boardwalk itself, a couple miles of trail through tidal flats, mangrove forests, jungle and open water. We saw crabs, lobsters, fish, lizards and birds. It was lovely.
Pulau Ubin is definitely a place that should be near the top of the list for any visitor to Singapore. Residents too.
One day in mid-November, Nyan took the day off from school and went to the aquarium with Grandma and Grandpa. He wasn’t feeling that well, so they came home early. A couple hours later, during dinner, he got sick! Poor little guy. He started being feverish a couple hours later; he’d caught a virus! So the next day he called in sick to school and spent most of the day sleeping.
He did manage to get up later in the day for some light food and light reading.
By the next day, the fever was gone and he seemed fine, though we kept him home just to be sure. By the afternoon, he was full of beans and life. Whew. Just a quick 24-hour virus, apparently.
Another day during November, we took Grandma and Grandpa to a Singapore Slingers basketball game. It was, in fact, their opening game of the season, and a fun time was had by all! Even though the team lost.
We also did some swimming during the month, including a lesson with Pang:
Nyan also decided to become a swim instructor himself, helpfully giving extensive tips to Mommy while she swam.
Well done, Teacher Nyan!
One of the many activities that Nyan did with Grandma and Grandpa was an evening at Fun Siamo, the baking studio in the mall that’s attached to Mommy’s office tower. Mommy and Nyan did it earlier in the fall, you’ll recall, and Nyan couldn’t wait to do some baking with his grandparents.
Even Grandpa got into it.
Check out Nyan’s concentration. He’s becoming a great little chef!
Putting on the final touches (complete with licking the spatula).
And they’re done. Delicious!
Our boy keeps insisting he doesn’t want to do taekwondo any more. But it’s a half-hearted plea, and we think motivated much more by feeling a little too lazy to go to class, than by any real objection. And sure enough, once he gets to class, he always has a blast.
In early November, he qualified for the next round of grading, which if he passed would get him a green belt.
And — as you already know from the title of this post — he passed! So a couple weeks later, we got the new-belt ceremony in class.
Now that he’s a green belt, he gets to do sparring, which is a separate one-hour class held just before his regular one-hour taekwondo class. Sparring involves kicking and hitting a fellow student — properly padded, of course — and other fun activities.
So yeah, we expect Nyan will continue to whine about taekwondo, and we’ll continue to take him, and he’ll continue to have a great time. Circle of life.
The Moscow Circus came to town, so we took Grandma and Grandpa to see it, along with Nyan, of course. It was at the same location we saw Cirque du Soleil a year and a bit ago, and while it’s hard to compare, we think we might have to say Moscow was even better! Nonstop action, laughter, thrills… no animals, either. Just freakishly talented people doing acrobatics, contortion, motorcycle tricks, etc.
Motorcycle tricks? Yeah. Like four motorcycles zooming round and round inside a tiny metal ball, and somehow managing to not hit each other.
Check out the faces during the show. Spellbound!
We actually took hardly any photos of the show itself; too busy being enthralled. Here are a couple shots of the scenery outside the big tent, on a beautiful full moon night:
And finally, just goofing around with camera filters, and with the reflections and the CC tv display at the subway station just outside the circus. Silly boy.
November was a busy month. The highlight was definitely Grandma and Grandpa flying all the way from Iowa to visit Nyan (and Mommy and Daddy) for three weeks. They got up to all sorts of fun, which we’ll be chronicling in upcoming posts. Here’s a first look at some of the general frivolity.
The day they arrived, Nyan and Daddy met them at the airport. (Mommy was in Hong Kong for a brief business trip.) Here’s our boy, anxiously watching for them to arrive at the baggage claim, and then posing while waiting for a taxi.
One evening, we stayed up late (10pm!) to watch the movie E.T. Here’s our boy on the couch with his grandparents.
As any long-time reader of this blog knows, Nyan loves to read. So he did a lot of that with Grandma and Grandpa. See:
Toward the end of their stay, Kathy and Joe — Grandma’s cousins and close friends — happened to be in town for a few days, at the end of a weeks-long cruise through Asia. Kathy and Joe adore Nyan — Kathy came to visit him in New York when he was just a few months old — so we spent a lot of time with them. Here they are one evening, Kathy and Joe (and Grandma and Grandpa) watching as Nyan does his abacus homework.
Nyan of course likes to draw too. Here he is, explaining one of his creations to Grandpa.
Nyan helped Grandma in the kitchen too, peeling potatoes one evening:
He also enlisted their help to put up and decorate the Christmas tree toward the end of the month.
And here are a few pictures of Grandma and Grandpa (and others) out and about in Singapore.
We close with these shots of Nyan and Grandma, just hanging out and enjoying each others’ company.
We’ll have much more about their visit in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!
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